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Integrated Application Lifecycle Management, A case study for ALM Middleware Introduction One of the most desirable aspects of software development process for the last decade has been Integrated Application Lifecycle Management-ALM. Integrated ALM today is also known as End-To-End ALM in some vendor literature's and websites. Fulfilling this promise by various vendors has been patchy at best. However, in the last 2 years, things are changing as new technologies are maturing in highly critical production systems, there by bringing some of the long overdue benefits of Integrated ALM to real development. Today, if an organization is not thinking about integrated ALM, it is missing some compelling benefits, which are discussed in a companion White paper from Kovair “10 Benefits Of Integrated ALM Solutions”. In this paper, we will discuss three widely used approaches provided by different vendors over time towards achieving Integrated ALM and the relative merits of these solutions. We will especially focus on a new integration technology - ALM Middle ware for achieving an Integrated ALM for a mixed vendor tools environment. In a software development process, various tools are used both for managing the development process as well as for the actual creation and testing of software code. Following is a list of such tools some of which are generic (e.g. Document Management) and some are very specific to software development (e.g. Debugger/ Profiler): --> Ideation/ Idea Management Tool --> Requirements Elicitation Tool --> Requirements Management Tool --> Design and Modeling Tool --> IDE (Integrated Development environment) --> Unit Test Tool --> Project Management Tool --> Document Management Tool --> Build Tool --> Configuration Management Tool --> Test Management Tool --> Test Automation Tool --> Debugger/ Profiler --> Issues Management Tools/ Change Management Tool --> Help desk Tool --> Time sheet Tool These tools either generate or manage different objects necessary for managing the ALM process. The objects include Requirements for Requirements Management, Test cases for Test Management and Source files for Configuration Management. In this document we will refer to these objects as ALM Artifacts or Artifacts. Since we are still in a nascent stage of Integrated ALM support systems and competing vendors are trying to establish the concepts, the best way to define such concepts is to focus on the results of implementing such a system. Read more about Integrated Application Lifecycle Management at wikipedia. Also read more about IT Service Management here.